Links

Currently, in my opinion, it’s the most comprehensive benchmark of server-side
Swift frameworks, published by
Ryan Collins. Most importantly, it also features
memory-related metrics that are as crucial as the raw RPS power.

Hesham Salman has written a pretty nice
list of changes coming in the new Swift version that will be released,
most probably, next month. It also contains code listings with “before” and “after” versions.

A tutorial by Ed Sasena for Apple’s CloudKit.
While CloudKit isn’t as powerful as some other popular cloud storage solutions,
it’s main benefit, in my opinion, are pretty generous free tier limits which
are quite hard to exceed for most of the simple apps. Recently CloudKit also
became usable on server-side with CloudKit Web Services.

An article by Airspeed Velocity, updated
by Ole Begemann and
Chris Eidhof for Swift 3. Although I’ve read
the previous version, it was worth reading it again as a refresher for mechanics
of Swift strings, especially in the light of small, but important changes
coming in Swift 3.0.

While code in this article by Matthijs Hollemans runs only on iOS and macOS, it’s one of the not so
many machine learning introductions written specifically in Swift. The only
iOS/macOS dependency in the article’s code is
Accelerate,
and I look forward to
Swift-AI becoming Linux-compatible,
so that Accelerate code can be replaced in a Linux port.

An overview by Matt Gallagher of a most common pattern in Swift error handling that, surprisingly
enough, still isn’t included in the Swift’s standard library: Result type.
Part 2
compares Swift’s error handling with different implementations in other languages.

Code

Remember FileMaker? Now you can integrate
it with apps written in Swift.

This project provides access to FileMaker Server databases using the XML Web publishing interface.
This package builds with Swift Package Manager and is part of the Perfect project. It was written to be stand-alone and so does not need to be run as part of a Perfect server application.

Published by Harlan Haskins, this is a very
interesting package to explore if you’re interested in language and compiler
design. Interestingly enough, it has both LLVM and JavaScript backends.

Trill is a simple, type-safe, compiled programming language. Partially inspired by Swift, Trill has most simple language features one would expect (functions, structures, pointers) and some more high-level language features, like types with methods, garbage collected types, overloading, tuples/multiple returns, and closures.

I know you’ve been thinking.. “What I really need is a way to bridge Swift to Java” but there are a number of use cases:
1. Making Java technologies such as JDBC available to macOS applications.
2. Giving Swift applications on Linux a portable user interface using Swing.
3. Making business logic in written in Swift available to Android apps.

The big missing point in the list, in my opinion, is calling Java libraries
from Swift code on Linux. This seems to be possible with these tools, and there
is a huge J2EE ecosystem to be explored on server-side.